Description

Tech Tuesday is a new monthly series that will cover today's hottest topics in technology. This series will be fun and interactive. Bring a laptop, questions, and be ready to learn!

This month's Tech Tuesday will feature Dave Norton, who’s been working in the world of supercomputing for the past thirty years designing, building, and programming some of the world’s largest computers.  Dave will be discussing “Open Source” software (free downloadable software) for Android operating systems; Chrome and Firefox web browsers, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, and challenges to Microsoft Office. 
 
Attendees will learn the genesis of open source software, and where it might be appropriate to use. Different types of open source licenses and the very different philosophies behind them will also be discussed.  While there are several different types of free software licenses, they commonly grant freedom to run the program, to study how the program works, to change the program to do exactly what you need (access to the source code is a precondition of this), and to distribute your modifications to the software. 
 
This type of software development freedom originated in the 70's when computers were comprised of proprietary hardware, software, and operating systems. Users of the systems quickly grew weary of having to master new tools and operating systems if they wanted to change vendors when purchasing a computer. To help remedy this, developers wrote their own tools and shared them with one another - for free.
 
Attendees will look at some of these programs, learn how to install them using common configuration options, and learn what a "virtual machine" is and who might benefit from using it.